Using WORDLE to Illustrate Reports

When submitting reports or papers, or even giving a Power Point presentation, it is nice to have an illustration of what your presenting. There is an online tool which allows you to generate a "word cloud" which you can place at the beginning of any report, paper, or presentation. This tool is called, Wordle. Wordle is a tool that generates word clouds from any text that you provide. These word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text; that is, words used most often are large and words used less often are smaller. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, color schemes and backgrounds. The images you create with Wordle can be copy and pasted into documents or presentations. To illustrate, I have made two word clouds.

This "word cloud" represents text I copied and pasted into Wordle from a semi-annual report submitted by a project for street-children in Georgia.

This "word cloud" represents text from a proposal written for supporting children in the marsh lands of Iraq.

So, this is a great tool to embellish a report or presentation and gives the reader a "snap shot" of what will be presented. In both word clouds, the most prominent theme is "children" with other relevant themes and issues. It is a great way to check if children are the most common theme in your report, proposal or presentation. The link to Wordle is: http://www.wordle.net/